For centuries, the Balkans
have been synonymous with political instability. They have been the tiny nations that rest
on the geopolitical fissures separating East and West.

Now, with Serbia's brutal assault on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and NATO's retaliatory
bombing, those fault lines are under new stress. Balkan turmoil is sending shock waves as
far away as Moscow and Washington.

Because of Yugoslavias strategic position, the
potential consequences of the Kosovo conflict go beyond the immediate human tragedy in
Kosovo, beyond the Serb atrocities and beyond the hundreds of thousands of ethnic
Albanians driven from their homes.

Just as a Serb assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in
Sarajevo in 1914 touched off World War I, the conflict in Kosovo could be the domino that
starts a cascade of other political troubles. One of the dominoes already teetering is
Boris Yeltsin's government. With it could fall the U.S.-Russian détente that has marked
the post-Cold War era.

Adding to the danger in Moscow is a restless Russian
military chafing under the humiliation of watching NATO expand to the borders of the old
Soviet Union. With the central government in disarray, the once-proud Russian army is
facing payless paydays and is left with rusting, second-class equipment.

U.S. officials with access to intelligence data
describe the majority of Russian generals as deeply dissatisfied and pressing for
leadership changes in Moscow. One concern is the potential for a military coup, though
senior Clinton administration officials see that as a remote possibility.

Still, Washington policymakers fear that the Balkan
violence could feed the forces of Russian nationalism and further weaken Yeltsin's shaky
grip on power. Even without Kosovo, the ailing Yeltsin was in serious political trouble.

Millions of Russians blame him and his U.S.-prescribed
economic policies for the poverty pushing the nation into Third World status.

There are also expanding investigations of Yeltsin's
business allies -- the so-called "gang of seven" -- and how they enriched
themselves through rigged "privatization" schemes and other shady practices. The
abuses include alleged payoffs to Yeltsin and his family.

Cracks in Yeltsin's stonewall have been opening since
March when Yeltsin tried to fire Yuri I. Skuratov, Russias chief prosecutor. A
pro-Yeltsin television station aired a videotape showing Skuratov cavorting with two naked
women. But the dismissal was blocked when the upper house of the Russian parliament,
normally a Yeltsin rubber stamp, overturned the presidents decision.

Then, on April 1, Skuratov announced a criminal case
against well known political figures. The prosecutor withheld the names. But
Gennadi Zyuganov, the Communist Party chief, said Skuratov was targeting members of
Yeltsin's inner circle who have stashed some $40 billion in Swiss bank accounts.

The day after Skuratovs announcement, Yeltsin
again tried to dismiss the prosecutor. The president cited new evidence that a businessman
under criminal investigation had paid for the women caught on the videotape with Skuratov.
Yeltsin's critics, however, denounced the latest move as another clumsy cover-up.

Yeltsin also distanced himself from Boris Berezovsky, a
tycoon with close ties to Yeltsin's family. Yeltsin ousted Berezovsky from a political
post at the Commonwealth of Independent States. Russian authorities then embarrassed
Berezovsky further by barring his private jet from reentering Russia.

On April 6, the prosecutor generals office
charged Berezovsky with graft and corruption involving millions of dollars and the
nation's largest airline, Aeroflot, where Yeltsins son-in-law was a senior
executive.

Yeltsin can expect more trouble from Russia's lower
house, dominated by anti-Yeltsin forces. The parliament has scheduled debate on a motion
to impeach Yeltsin, starting on April 15. [NYT, April 3, 1999]

The crisis in Kosovo compounds
Yeltsin's political problems. His policy of accommodation with the United States has made
him appear to be a Western stooge as NATO jets and missiles pound Yugoslavia, a
traditional Russian ally.

Yeltsin has responded with verbal criticism of
President Clinton but has taken only symbolic steps to demonstrate Russian disapproval.
Anti-Yeltsin politicians have demanded a tougher reaction, including the dispatch of
Russian warships to the Mediterranean.

The worsening political situation in Russia is fast
becoming the nuclear backdrop to the human crisis in Kosovo. In neither place does the
Clinton administration confront easy choices.

With Russia, President Clinton must gauge whether
NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia -- and the possible commitment of ground troops
in Kosovo -- will worsen instability in the Kremlin. U.S. officials are counting on
Russias desperate need for foreign economic aid to keep the Kremlin in line.

With Yugoslavia, Clinton must calculate if a
sophisticated bombing campaign can inflict sufficient pain on the Serb-dominated
government of Slobodan Milosevic to force his army and police to halt their atrocities
against Albanian Kosovars. The initial phase of the bombing appears only to have whipped
Serbian forces into a greater fury.

Many military experts doubt that air power alone will
work. Some leading Republicans, such as Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Richard Lugar of
Indiana, have urged Clinton to escalate with the introduction of ground troops. NATO is
considering deployment of ground forces if the bombing can drive the Serb army out of
parts of Kosovo and if those areas can be turned into NATO-protected zones for ethnic
Albanians.

Other senators have suggested covert CIA support for
the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA], which has been fighting the Serb army but has been
mauled during the recent Serb offensive. Besides its inept performance on the battlefield,
the KLA has other negatives. Over the past year, senior U.S. officials have bluntly
criticized the KLA for its "terrorist" tactics and its criminal associations.

U.S. intelligence sources told me that elements of the
KLA are implicated in heroin smuggling from the Middle East to Europe. One source said
covert assistance to the KLA would again put the CIA in collaboration with a corrupt
guerrilla band. "It would be the same drug-trafficking problem that Ollie North got
into with the contras," the source said.

Ironically, U.S. officials who long disputed the
accuracy of reports implicating the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras in cocaine trafficking
during the 1980s tacitly accepted that historical reality in discussing the KLA. Sen.
Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who favors CIA support for the KLA, cited the contra precedent in
sidestepping the question of KLA links to drug trafficking.

"I don't think we have to do a background check
[on the KLA] any more than we did on the contras," McConnell said. "I have no
doubt there may be some bad actors [among the KLA], but the point is who else is on the
ground willing to fight the ethnic cleansing." [NYT, April 4, 1999]

A more fundamental dilemma in
Kosovo is how to disentangle ethnic rivalries that date back to the Middle Ages. Because
the Balkans marked the eastern frontier of Christian Europe and the western reaches of the
Turkish empire, the region has long been rife with ethnic and religious rivalries.

Kosovo was the birthplace of Serb civilization, the
site of many ancient Serb churches and historic buildings. Kosovo was where the Serbs made
a valiant stand against an invading Turkish army in 1389 at Kosovo Polje. The Turks
carried the day and slaughtered an estimated 77,000 Serbs.

In the early 20th Century, various rulers sought to
pull the Balkans together under unified Yugoslavian leadership. But violence, including
the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, often succeeded in blocking these initiatives.

World War II deepened the ethnic hatreds. After the
Axis powers conquered the region in 1941, a brutal fascist party called the Ustasa ruled
Croatia in northern Yugoslavia and exterminated ethnic Serbs as well as Jews.

The Ustasa methods of execution were so grotesque that
even German SS officers reportedly were aghast. Yet, while the Ustasa brutality sought to
impose Croat ethnic purity, Serbs fought in the Resistance under the leadership of a Croat
communist, Josep Broz Tito.

After the Axis powers were defeated, Tito displayed
extraordinary political skills in cobbling the divided region and its ethnic rivals into a
multiethnic Yugoslavia. But Kosovo, with its dominant Albanian majority, demanded greater
freedom. To appease the ethnic Albanians, Tito granted broad autonomy to Kosovo in 1968.

With Tito's death in 1980 and the collapse of Eastern
European communism in the late 1980s, the ethnic strains began pulling Yugoslavia apart
again. In 1987, Slobodan Milosevic rose to power after a dramatic speech at the ancient
battlefield in Kosovo. He cleverly exploited the glorious defeat to rally his Serb
supporters to his nationalistic cause. In 1989, Milosevic stripped Kosovo of its autonomy
and ousted local Albanian leaders.

But the old Yugoslavia was disintegrating. In 1992,
Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence, a move recognized by the European
community. Meanwhile, the ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina -- Croats, Muslims and
Serbs -- turned on each other in a civil war that introduced the phrase "ethnic
cleansing" into the world's vocabulary.

The European community and the United States reacted
slowly, failing to avert the slaughter of thousands of civilians. Belatedly, the Clinton
administration pressed for and -- after a brief period of NATO air strikes -- achieved a
negotiated settlement at Dayton, Ohio. The deal divided Bosnia and Herzegovina into three
parts. NATO also deployed peace-keepers to prevent a renewal of fighting.

While that civil war raged to the
north, political tensions mounted in Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians -- whose numbers had
grown to 90 percent of the population -- were protesting again. In 1998, the KLA raised
the political stakes by targeting Serb policemen for assassination. Serbs complained, too,
that the KLA employed terror tactics to force the Serb minority out of Kosovo.

Militarily, however, the KLA accomplished little, other
than to bring down the wrath of the Serb forces on Kosovo. The Serb army struck with a
full-scale offensive, routing the lightly armed KLA and then terrorizing the civilian
population. The Serb forces also cut a swath of destruction across Kosovo, burning
villages, slaughtering livestock and killing civilians.

Initially, U.S. officials voiced ambivalence toward the
Serb position on Kosovo. U.S. special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, visited
Belgrade and called the KLA "without question a terrorist group." One American
diplomat told correspondent Don North that Washington had given Milosevic a green light to
"take the KLA down a peg." [See iF Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 1998.] But
Washington was stunned by the ferocity of the Serb offensive.

In late 1998, under threats of NATO air strikes, the
two sides agreed to a cease-fire. But the KLA regrouped in early 1999 and began regaining
lost territory. That prompted another fierce reaction from the Serb military.

Following a new round of Serb atrocities including a
massacre of ethnic Albanians at Racak on Jan. 15, the Western allies pressured the two
sides to meet in Paris. The goal was to negotiate a settlement that would grant Kosovo
autonomy and provide for NATO peace-keepers.

But many Serbs saw the NATO-negotiated solution, an
autonomous Kosovo, as simply an interim step toward Kosovo's secession from what was left
of Yugoslavia. That also would mean the loss of historic sites considered sacred in Serb
culture as well as the possible persecution of the remaining Serbs in Kosovo. Once NATO
troops were stationed as peace-keepers in Kosovo, the Serbs believed they would have
little leverage to block a secession movement.

So, Milosevic rejected NATO troops and resumed military
operations. President Clinton and other NATO leaders ordered limited bombing attacks with
the goal of pressuring Milosevic to accept the settlement.

Instead, the Serbs escalated their attacks across
Kosovo, forcing hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians to flee. Many poured across
international borders. Others apparently were trapped inside Kosovo.

The human tragedy that the bombing would continue until
Milosevic agreed to permit the prompted more NATO air attacks and a warning from Clinton
return of the refugees -- and to accept NATO peace-keepers inside Kosovo.

The rumblings along the Balkan fault lines had begun to
reach the White House and the Kremlin.